


are you lost enough?

by mornen



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Backstory, Camping, Child Neglect, Depression, Drinking, Drunkenness, Fleshing out minor characters, Gen, Late Night Conversations, Nature, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Poverty, Sea, Slice of Life, Talking, Violent past, swamps, tragic backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:35:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26935978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mornen/pseuds/mornen
Summary: Kite and Spin discuss their childhoods on a camping trip.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	are you lost enough?

It’s July and desperately hot. Kite’s dragged his sleeping bag from the tent to sleep under the stars. The forest is dark patches of trees spaced with blue where the ocean peaks through. The fire is getting low, and the ocean weaves in and out on the rocky shore. 

Kite watches the soft clouds part over the trees. They are a dull grey tinged with orange from the city a few miles away. Spin’s dragged her sleeping bag out too. It was hot in the tent and hard to breathe. Her sleeping bag is on the other side of the camp fire, and she lies on top of it, one leg up against a nearby tree. She’s dressed in grey sweat pants and a white tank top, and they both glow faintly in the dim light against the black trees.

‘Are you awake?’ Spin glances at him.

Kite nods. He listens to the waves and the occasional bird song. There’s an owl not far from them. He can hear its heartbeat. 

Spin sits up and undoes the drawstrings on her pants. She pulls them off slowly and puts them, in a ball, on the bottom of her sleeping bag.

‘Watch out for ticks,’ Kite says.

Spin hesitates, not sure if she wants to put the pants back on. She’s sweating and her legs are itchy. But he’s right. They’re in the woods and even with no tall brush around there might be ticks. She drags her sleeping bag back into the tent. 

They’re travelling alone for a week. The rest of their group is scattered too, each exploring a different swamp. They’ve made their camp in view of their swamp. A soft fire flickers enticingly on it. The fire goes out when Kite blinks, and the dark patch of salty marsh becomes invisible again, only its scent and the vastness of the dark where the trees have stopped giving away its location. 

Kite moves closer to the tent. He can’t sleep, but he doesn’t know why. Maybe he’s scared of it again. Sometimes he gets scared of it. 

Spin lies awake too. She’s not used to the heat. She never travelled before. She never expected to. They didn’t have that kind of money. They lived in a mining town, but the mine was shut down, and there were no jobs. She didn’t know then that they were poor or that other people would pity them. 

It was beautiful, and the swans would fly, and they got enough food from the woods or the gardens, and that was enough for her. But it wasn’t enough for her father.

She would wake in the night then to her father coming home from the bar. And she’d lie awake as he ate the food she’d made and wait for him to either go to bed or to come and shout at her. Then he’d sleep through the day and stumble out again in the evening. 

‘What are you thinking?’ Kite asks, his voice cutting through her thoughts and the quiet of the ocean waves. 

‘I don’t know,’ Spin says. ‘About my da I guess.’ 

‘Mm.’ Kite nods. ‘Do you miss him?’

Spin chews on her knuckles. She doesn’t know if she misses him. There isn’t much to miss. Just the times when he would call her his little girl and bounce her on his knee. But he was so sad, and it consumed him. And he didn’t try hard enough to save himself. Not even for her. 

‘He cried when he found out he was dying,’ Spin says, because she wants to talk about it. Because Kite’s had enough pain that he can handle hearing about this. Because in the dark in the heat with the waves pressing to the shore a few metres from them she wants to tell every secret she’s ever had until there’s nothing left hidden in her soul. 

‘He said he was sorry. He said he’d wanted to see me grow up. Get married…’ she trails off. She isn’t crying, she doesn’t even feel close to crying. ‘I don’t know why he thought he’d miss it. It’s not like he saw shit when he was alive.’ 

Kite nods in the dark. He reaches for her hand, and his hand finds the small wall underneath the tent’s open door. He lets his hand rest there. 

‘He died so fast,’ Spin says. She doesn’t know what else to say. She’s told him this already, when she got drunk and mad and sobbed in his arms against his chest and threw up on his shirt a little before he got her to the toilet. 

Spin balls her hand into a fist. All she wants to know is why she wasn’t good enough. Why she wasn’t enough for him to get up off that floor and find some joy in life. He could start with her. He could have taught her to cook or fish or how to drive. He could have measured her against the bookcase and marked the places where she grew each year. 

Stick’s mum taught her all those things. Stick’s mum was the one who measured her against the bookcase in their living room and wrote her name ‘Spin’ next to her height and compared her and Stick as they chased each other up and down with their growth spurts. Who stood behind her as she boiled over pots of sauce or kneaded lumps of dough. She was the one who helped Spin with her homework and cut her hair and who took her in the old truck to the back roads to learn to drive. Who taught her how to dig up worms, reel in fish, sprout potatoes, plant garlic in the crisp autumn. 

Her da slept through all that. He slept and he vomited and he sobbed in the night, and she hated him for being so weak. And she hated herself for not being able to fix him. 

But that’s all gone now. And she’s travelling now. And she’s going to take the most difficult exam in the world. And she’s going to be an important person. And she’s going to be rich. And she’s going to pay back her debt. 

Spin’s hand presses against the wall of the tent, and Kite can feel her fingers against his through the fabric. He lifts his hand into the tent and takes her hand, tangling their fingers up together. 

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and he is. 

Spin lets out a shaky sigh. There’s no use crying about things you can’t change. Stick’s mum taught her that too. A fire lights above the swamp again. She knows what it is, and that she’ll drown out there, but she still wants to go. 

‘Do you remember your mother at all?’ Kite asks. 

‘No,’ Spin whispers. She doesn’t. Not even a faint memory. Not even a hint of a memory. Not even a dream that might have been real. 

She looks like her mother. 

Her father was tall and broad with brown hair that curled close to his scalp. He had brown eyes and rosy cheeks that sunk away with the cancer. 

She looks nothing like him. She’s the spitting image of her mother: small frame, small bones, tiny and pitiful looking, with big blue eyes and pale blond hair. Every picture of her mother makes her sad. She looks small and weak. She hates how she can’t look at her mother’s pictures without thinking how she looks like she would die at nineteen, pregnant with her second child. Like she had death stamped on her. Spin shudders. She hates how weak they both were. She hates that she hates that. 

‘But I was only two,’ Spin says. ‘Do you…. Remember your…..?’ she can’t finish the question. Kite rarely talks about his past. When he does it’s in passing, a soft musing, a wish for something he’ll never be able to have. 

She curses herself for asking. Of course he doesn’t know. He doesn’t even know where he was born. But she isn’t sure what he means by that. Did he travel? Was he with someone? Was he a little baby placed in a box on a doorstep? He must have had been fed as a baby by someone…. Some human. Unless he was raised by a wolf. She doesn’t know. All she knows is that he cries, sobbing into his hands, and he screams in his sleep, and he’s so sad around families. 

And Ging saved his life. 

Kite lies quietly. He’s still holding Spin’s hand. It’s damp with sweat. The campfire is just embers now. He’s facing the fire, but he can feel Spin’s gaze on him.

‘No,’ he says. He doesn’t say anything else. They lie in silence. Two fires appear over the swamp. They keep holding hands. 

‘Did she leave you?’ Spin asks. ‘When you were little?’

Kite licks his lip. He doesn’t like to think about his mother. He doesn’t like to imagine being born and promptly thrown away. He doesn’t want to think about if she was young and couldn’t get an abortion. If she was desperate for money. If she was raped. If she left him in a dumpster. He doesn’t want to know if she just didn’t care. 

When he was younger he liked to make up stories about her. She had his eyes, they had the same colour hair. She was tall like him. She loved animals. She was poor, but she was happy. And she wrapped him up in little clothes she’d made. And she kissed his face. And she sang him lullabies. And one night someone broke into her little room where she kept him in a cradle and stole him away. And she cried and cried and cried. 

Someday he’d find her and she’d hold him so tightly again and call him her baby and she’d stroke his hair and they’d live in a little room and eat bread dipped in broth. 

He was probably sold. That’s what desperate people do. 

Kite pushes his sleeping bag up against the tent. He holds his hand and Spin’s hand to his chest. Neither of them have spoken in minutes. The fires have died. The swamp is black again.

‘No,’ Kite says. ‘I don’t remember.’ He looks at Spin and her eyes are so big that he has to tell her something. ‘Maybe I was stolen.’

He leans over and kisses her cheek even though he’s never kissed her before and he doesn’t know if it’s the right way to comfort her. He doesn’t want to trouble her with his past. It was hell. 

It was hell: that’s all she needs to know. And he survived it only because Ging caught him. 

Spin closes her eyes, and they both breathe in the silence. Kite’s breath sounds too loud as he draws it in. The rustle of his body against the tent drowns out the birds, the ocean. 

Spin doesn’t move, but she doesn’t let go of his hand. Kite lies still. Her eyes are still closed. 

He wonders if he should apologise, but she brought it up. Spin rubs her thumb in a little circle against his hand. 

Kite sits up. ‘Move over.’

She does, and he puts his sleeping bag back in the tent. It’s going to get cold in the early morning. 

Spin turns over and kisses his cheek, and maybe it’s an apology and maybe it means they’re really friends now. She stares into his eyes, but she doesn’t know what he’s thinking. He touches her hair, twists some around his fingers. 

Spin touches her hair. The dye has faded some from the salt water, but you can’t tell in the dark. She keeps it dyed so she won’t look like her mother. She still does. She still looks weak. 

They’re alone for miles and miles. The sky is moving, clouds speeding over stars. Fires come and go in the dark, over the swamp.

‘Mmm.’ Kite frowns.

‘You want to go to it?’ Spin whispers. 

Kite takes her hand again. ‘Yeah.’

‘Even though you’d drown?’ 

‘I wouldn’t drown.’


End file.
